Reverse-Engineering the City

The number of slum dwellers increase by the combined size of Belgium and The Netherlands each year – 35 million people – yet architects are unable to give an adequate response to the problem of slums, as an article in The New York Times explains. The United Nations estimates that only 5 percent of the building work under way in the world’s expanding cities is actually planned, and as much as 70 percent of all Asian cities is unplanned.

Part of the problem, as it is argued, is the allocation of architects. Seventy percent of all architects come from the developed world, whilst 70 percent of the work to be done is in the developing word. The entire continent of Africa has 35,000 trained architects, of whom 25,000 are in Egypt. Italy alone has three times this number.

Another aspect is the curriculum of architectural courses; the tools and methods that are being taught. “Much of the urban growth of the 21st century is taking place in the developing world, but many of the theories of how cities function remain rooted in the developed world,” Ananya Roy , a professor in planning at the University of California, Berkeley, argues. She certainly has a point. The conventional mechanisms in architectural design prove to be terribly inadequate in relation to the city’s complexity in general, and the problem of the slums in particular.

This inadequacy is being reflected in the role of architects in the building process. In São Paulo for example, condominiums are being designed merely by engineers and marketeers. Architects and planners are seen as middlemen that are largely unnecessary. In China it is not that different:

“… In China, 40-story buildings are designed on Macintoshes in less than a week. In the context of this hyper development, the traditional architectural values – composition, aesthetics, balance – are irrelevant. The speed of international demands is completely out of pace with the ability of traditional designers to respond; construction has left architecture on the sidelines…” Rem Koolhaas, Wired 8.06

In the United Kingdom the devaluation of the architect’s role in the market is currently part of a heated debate regarding the decreasing payments and validation of architects.

The market, naturally, seeks for economy and efficiency, and demands short-term returns. This desire is often reflected in developments that respond to direct needs, but prove to be unmarketable in the longer term. An article in The Atlantic Magazine suggests that this trend may even lead to the creation of new slums. The public realm becomes increasingly inhabitable, as sociologists Manuel Castells and Teresa Caldeira observe, and the community disintegrates. In the absence of design, the city increasingly becomes a crime-ridden, congested and polluted place.

The dominance of the market in new developments is as much the result of the government’s failure to act as a guardian against it, as Jane Jacobs put it, as it is the architect’s failure to communicate the value of design to his clients, his inability to understand the city’s complexity, and his inadequacy to respond to it with viable design strategies.

Emergence

The first step for the architect to reclaim a role in the market would therefore be to get to grips with the city’s complexity. It means to appreciate and understand the problems and mechanisms that underlay the organic and out of control growth of the cities. This does not only encompass the mechanisms of the market. Physical mechanisms also play a role. An example.

These two pictures were published in The New York Times in August 2006. The picture to the left shows three neuron cells (two red and one yellow) of the brain of a mouse, along with their connections. The picture to the right was generated, and shows a large cluster of galaxies (bright yellow) surrounded by thousands of stars, galaxies and dark matter (web).

The picture below shows Europe by night. You can clearly distinguish the cities along with the roads that connect them. The picture has a striking resemblance with the pictures above. It suggests that the dynamics of all three pictures are driven by the same principles. Current research by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi and others in the field of network science is starting to unravel the principles behind these patterns. These and other insights are being linked to the city by Michael Batty and his research group at the University College London Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL CASA).

Another example. In July 2007, National Geographic published an article about swarm theory and self organizing systems. It described how a school of fish for example is able to make quick decisions by making use of collective intelligence. Basically it applies three basic rules: 1) avoid crowding nearby fishes, 2) swim in the average direction of nearby fishes, and 3) stay close to nearby fishes. This results in the typical behavior of a school of fish (or a swarm of birds) that we know from TV. Robots that have been operated by the same rules showed similar behavior. It demonstrates that is is rather easy to reproduce what appear to be complex systems with simple rules. You could equally argue that swarm theory is applicable to slum urbanism as well. Imagine the rules above to be translated to informal urbanism: 1) avoid crowding too much nearby other dwellings, 2) build in the grid of nearby dwellings and 3) stay close to nearby dwellings. It is a simple algorithm. And indeed, the map below, of favela Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, closely resembles a swarm, albeit a frozen one.

These two examples illustrate that complex systems define their own behaviour. Spontaneous networks are a law of nature, and what seem to be complex systems can be driven by simple rules.

Modeling

By regarding cities through physics we will be able to distill principles, or algorithms, which in turn will enable us to start building computer models. Mind you, models do not have to be perfect:

“ Scientific descriptions (…) do not fully capture reality – they are models. This is not a shortcoming but a strength of science – much of the scientist’s art lies in figuring out what to include and what to exclude in a model, and this ability shows science to make useful predictions without getting bogged down by intractable details.” Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry – p. 14

In this sense, (computer) models are nothing more than sophisticated design sketches. Like architectural design sketches on paper, they are primarily useful not to predict, but to analyze, gain insight and provide direction.

It wouldn’t be the first time computational power and automated analysis change a doctrine. Number crunching has led to revolutions in other fields already. Two examples.

In biology, a method developed by Craig Venter called shotgun sequencing has land to a landslide in the way and speed genome sequencing is being done. Sequencing means defining the order of the four letters of the genetic code (DNA bases A, C, G, T) from a certain DNA. The traditional BAC to BAC sequencing method required the production of a crude physical map prior to the actual sequencing process. During sequencing, a single string of DNA would be cut up in relatively long strings, after which each string would be analyzed one at the time. Ultimately all sequences would be stitched together again according to the previously produced map in order to reproduce the entire DNA sequence. Shotgun sequencing however does not require the prior production of a map. During sequencing multiple strings of the same DNA are cut op randomly in relatively small pieces, after which the letters are defined of all strings. Once done, a computer program analyzes the sequence of letters and looks for overlaps. By using these overlaps and combining them the original long DNA string can be reproduced. The combination of the absence of a map, the random approach and the relative short strings of DNA make shotgun sequencing a much quicker method than BAC to BAC sequencing. (More here, here and here)

The Illinois based company Lanworth managed to improve the estimates of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on crop harvests considerably. Where the USDA based its estimates on questionnaires and surveys for farmers, Landworth used satellite images, digital soil maps and weather forecasts to project harvests at a detailed level. Their method proved to be so successful that they are now active internationally, doing the same assessment for wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina. “There are questions about how big the total human food supply is and whether we as a country are exposed to risk,” says Lanworth’s director of information services, Nick Kouchoukos. “We’re going after the global balance sheet.” (More here)

Architecture needs a similar revolution. We need computational power to analyze the behavior of cities to be able to anticipate to them. We need to start sequencing the DNA of the city.

“… We can’t do Mickey Mouse feel-good projects – digging latrines and helping 54 families to get a better toilet. This will not solve the problem. We need to change minds, not build water pumps…” – Lars Reutersward, architect and director of the global division at UN Habitat

This article is being updated continuously. Latest update: July 2010.

All work on NightlyBuilt.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means you are free to copy and reproduce, as long as you also make it available freely, and refer to the original author and site: Maurits Ruis (CC) 2010 – www.nightlybuilt.org .